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On the distribution of random lines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Peter Hall*
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
*
Postal address: Department of Statistics, SGS, The Australian National University, P.O. Box 4, Canberra, A.C.T. 2600, Australia.

Abstract

Draw two lines, L1 and L2, in a plane. Along L1 place the points of a Poisson process, and through each point draw a line, the angles of intersection with L1 being distributed independently and uniformly on (0, π) . The intercepts of these random lines with L2 form a new process, which is Poisson if and only if L1 and L2 are parallel. Curiously, if L1 and L2 are inclined then, with probability 1, the new process forms a dense subset of L2. It is not really even a point process. In the present paper we shall investigate this anomaly and some of its generalizations.

Type
Research Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 

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